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North Sea Radio Orchestra - Kingstanding
Tindersticks - Rented Rooms
Mogwai - Christmas Steps -
three tracks
Michelle Shocked - 5AM In Amsterdam (Texas Campfire Tapes)
Focus - Hocus Pocus (Moving Waves)
Wagner vs. Wiener Philharmoniker feat George Solti - Tannhäuser overture -
Three tracks? I’m looking for certain attributes:
Impact / attack: Lust for life - Iggy Pop… if the first 20 seconds don’t have you dancing & grinning, and slightly scared, the system lacks Impact
Vocal purity… And ‘weight’ of piano
Scale! Procession of the Sardar
Timing : for a bonus, to check the ‘timing’ of a system (or a room) … at about 2 minutes in - the music in this track starts and stops rapidly.. which sounds breathtaking on a system that can pull it off… leaving what feels like a vacuum hanging in the air for a moment. Lightweight cones and single driver speakers rule here
Have fun
P.s. I’m using a pair of genelec monitors at the moment, and while nice, they basically fail at all of the above
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If you had three tracks/songs to demo hifi equipment, upgrades etc. The aim being to find equipment you would want to live-with/invest in .. what you your go-to tracks be?
The Charlatans, Page One on Between 10th and 11th
It's over-produced and there's a lot of things going on. This track reveals compression artifacts well, and reveals any lack of sound stage. On a lot of systems the instruments bleed into each other and cannot be picked out. If I listen to this and I feel fatigued from the listening I won't buy the system. If I listen to this and it feels like an ascendance, that the music is wide spaced, crisp and I'm floating in the midst of it all and Tim Burgess sounds other-worldly... then this is a phenomenal system.
It's not like I love this song... it's just a song that reveals systems and sounds very different from system to system.
Radiohead, The National Anthem on Kid A
It's a complex track with everything from a rumbling distorted bass line to strings, lyrics, crisp cymbals... but it's also really well produced. This shouldn't sound muddy or messy, it should sound quite spacious whilst also feeling quite tight and connected. It also should make you want to move, the groove within it shouldn't be rendered too clinical or sterile. I use this to test for the overall balance, sound space, bass muddiness, etc. This should sound good full stop... if it doesn't, the system isn't right for me.
15 Step from In Rainbows is the better song, but this tests a system better.
The third track though... ah, well now it depends. I'll either go to industrial rock (Nine Inch Nails - Wish), indie electronic (Chemical Brothers - Out of Control), indie rock (Dead Pony - 23, Never Me), vocals (Cat Power - Manhattan or Beth Orton - Stolen Car or Neko Case - Deep Red Bells) - or I'll venture into hip-hop (Wu-Tang or Beasties), jazz or classical, or even opera. I frequently will use a Belle and Sebastian track (something off of Fold Your Hands as that's the one I know most intimately and heard live, pre-production as well as masters, etc as well as having listened to the album thousands of times, and seen performed live tens or hundreds of times).
I only use 2 tracks for accepting / rejecting things... after that it's fine tuning and I'll jump around like a madman.
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rodan
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@smithchild
If you had three tracks/songs to demo hifi equipment, upgrades etc. The aim being to find equipment you would want to live-with/invest in .. what you your go-to tracks be?